Sushi or Zushi ?

すし or ずし ?
Ren_daku (連濁)

If you have questions, why there are 'sushi' and 'zushi' everywhere and every sushi term found in the world?

Sushi and zushi:

It comes the way how people describe the word 'sushi' ( 鮨 / 寿司 ) whether phonetically transliterate exactly equall to the Japanese reading and sound, or understandable, comprehensive to others who do not know Japanese well, i.e. English speaking people.

There is a unique rule in Japanese that a word 'sushi' changes its sound to 'zushi' (an unvoiced consonant s changes to voiced z) when it makes a compound word with a preceding adjectival modifier word. Apparently, sushi [ すし ] → zushi [ ずし], or su [ す ] → zu [ ず ], by an addition of [ ゛], voice-mark to the Japanese kana-character that corresponds to its reading sound.

In general in a compound word, if the latter word begins with a consonant (either of /k/, /s/, /t/, /h/, /f/, /ch/, /sh/, /ts/) each of them changes as follows.

k

→

g

s

→

z

t

→

d

h

→

b

f

→

b

ch

→

j

sh

→

j

ts

→

z

For example, almost all sushi terms that end with suffixed-sushi, this rule is applied (cf. Sushi Glossary):

If Mr. Aoki opens a sushi bar bearing his name, usually there are two alternatives, prefixed or suffixed with the word 'Sushi.'

· Sushi Aoki

鮨 青木

[すし あおき]

prefix — no change

(Sushi Aoki

寿司 青木

[すし あおき]

· Aokizushi

青木鮨

[あおきずし]

suffix — changed

(Aokizushi

青木寿司

[あおきずし])

This rule is grammatically called Rendaku.

Wikipedia:

Ren_daku (連濁[れん_だく], lit. "sequential_voicing") is a phenomenon in Japanese morphology which governs the voicing of the initial consonant of the non-initial portion of a compound or prefixed word. Rendaku is a common but unpredictable phenomenon in modern Japanese. The "voicing" is not a strict change from voiceless to voiced sounds, but rather the action of adding a 'daku_ten' ( ◌゛: voiced_sound-mark, 濁点) to the first kana of the portion being altered. It is also known as "sequential voicing."Rendaku can be seen in the following: